The college football season kicks off this weekend with a game between Florida State and Georgia Tech in Ireland. This is what is now called “week zero” of the college football calendar where a handful of teams start the season early. Labor Day weekend remains the “official” start of the college football season. For the longest time, football season was Labor Day to Thanksgiving, but like everything else that tradition has given way to rapacious greed by all involved.
College sports is a genuinely American thing. On the one hand, it is amateur sports played by college students. On the other hand, it is a billion-dollar sports entertainment industry operating on college campuses. Even elite colleges like Stanford, Northwestern and Boston College find a way to be in the circus, while pretending to put academics ahead of the sports entertainment business. It is a uniquely American form of mass self-deception that the rest of the world does not understand.
The roots of college football are as normal as any other tradition. The game evolved from both rugby and soccer, which were popular sports in the 19th century. The old English line that “Soccer is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans, and rugby is a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen” carried over to America. Young college men would play one or both, depending upon their inclination. Before long they combined into what eventually became American football.
Naturally, the young men playing sports on their college campus would want to test themselves against the young men on the nearby college campus. Until fairly recent, this was the normal habit of young males. Legend has it that Princeton and Rutgers played the first American football game, but it was more like soccer. Harvard and McGill played the new game which quickly became popular and eventually supplanted both soccer and rugby on the college campus.
To some degree, the popularity of college football was due to one of those threads that made up the American character. In every region of the new country, self-organization was an essential element of life. This is something Tocqueville noted when he traveled around America in the 19th century. Self-organization was the antidote to the alienation and isolation that arises from democracy. Instead of withdrawing from mass public life, the individual forms islands of free association.
You see that in the early days of college football. The sport got its big boost in the Great Depression when local leaders were looking for ways to rally the people and keep them from organizing revolts against the government. Cheering on the local team as they did battle with the team from across town or across the state line was a good way to bring people together and to give them a healthy outlet. Many sports rivalries were born during the Great depression, even high school rivalries.
Of course, free association is at the heart of the college experience. For most families, primary school is a function of where they live. Your kids go to the local public schools whether you like it or not. It is why in the current age it has become common to ask the realtor showing you houses about the local basketball team. Parents understand that they are not just buying a house, but they are committing their children to the schools that come with the community in which the house is located.
College has never been that way. Young people are free to pick whatever college they like as long as they get accepted and can afford it. That plays a part in how the alumni of every school view their rival. Every school’s rival is populated with impoverished simpletons for some reason. While most students attend college within a three-hour drive of home, they are still spoiled for choice. This makes the rivalries between the schools possible and often makes them quite intense.
That is why college football rivalries remain, despite the fact that the localized logic and self-organization have given way to financialization and greed. The family who has always gone to Oklahoma continues to suspect that the people with the Longhorn sticker on their car are Harris voters, because it is the way it has always been and every autumn, they are reminded of that at the big game. America has always been a diverse country and that has always been the root of college rivalries.
The acid of modernity is slowly eroding this bit of social capital. The television oligopolies have decided it is good for them to have Oregon and Rutgers in the same football league. The league Oregon played in since forever was destroyed so they could join the Big Ten, which is still technically a Midwest conference. Washington, USC, and UCLA have also joined a conference whose center is two times zones away, because that makes sense to the bankers.
What is happening to college football is a microcosm of what has been happening everywhere in America since the dawn of financialization. The money men find a way to monetize social capital in order to haul it away to their vaults, leaving behind a shuffling husk of that which they sucked dry. College football is well on its way to becoming as artificial and synthetic as the suburban town center. The reason it exists is nothing organic is allowed to replace it.
Whether or not this is sustainable is never asked, as the point of the American economic model is for connected people to create bottlenecks they can then use to skim money from every transaction that passes through that bottleneck. This was the point Peter Theil made in his book. Once that bottleneck or monopoly is played out, then the parasites get back in their wagon and go looking for a new opportunity to exploit and never look back at what they left behind.
College football attendance has been in steady decline for a decade, even though the television dollars have exploded. They claim ratings are great, but no one cares about TV ratings, as most of the revenue comes from subscriptions. Television in America is one of those bottlenecks the oligarchs exploit. It is why CNN remains in business, despite having few viewers. At some point, the empty seats at football games will become a problem, but no one worries about it now.
For now, like so much of American life, what sustains college football is the echo of old America on which college football was built. Men watch games on Saturday because they watched games with their father, who watched games with his father. Maybe you make a trip to your alma mater once a year to see a game. The tradition has been hollowed out and is now worn as a skin suit by oleaginous television executives and grasping college administrators, but it is all you got.
That is the thing about traditions. People will hang onto them, no matter how tattered and lifeless, until something comes along to replace them. College football is a good example and representative of America as a whole. The fumes of old glory and old traditions fuel the present, but something will come along to replace those things and the people profiting off the nostalgia for them. After all, on any given Saturday, something could happen that changes everything.
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Are the Army and Navy teams full of girls and trannies? Why not? I’ve been told girls can fight in combat, so I want to see a hundred pound girl named Kayden play offensive line against Shitavious- because that’s equity.
The service academies relaxed admission standards for student athletes around 10-15 years ago to improve their teams. Navy is playing guys named DaShaun, Daba and Rayuan.
I attended the Academy forty years ago. Even back then it was obvious the jocks, especially the swarthier ones, were let in on lower standards. Same with the broads.
Has it gotten worse in the last fifteen years? What hasn’t?
I should clarify that from everything we have seen the service academies have lowered standards across the board. The standards for general cadets, midshipmen, etc. may not be any higher than they are for football and basketball players, they are much lower than they were 40 years ago. The big shift at Navy happened when they hired a Samoan named Ken Niumatalolo as coach in 2008. Army lost to them badly for a few years before they were able to catch up.
References to the problem of Shitavious and his “student” athlete brethren were conspicuous by their absence in this essay.
It was still a great essay. Perhaps the Shitaviazation of college football will be next in a series on the subject.
Shitaviazation – I nominate that word for inclusion of the next OED. (I think it can be used as a verb, adjective, or noun)
Many like to think of sports as the last bastion of meritocracy, but wokism is seeping into it’s pores nonetheless. Female reporters in the locker room, then female refs, kneeling about slavery, probably soon rainbow stickers on their helmets, armbands for trans kids, rainbow uniforms, pro-abortion bowl games. Is there a Pfizer® Bowl yet? Maybe no end to wokery’s infiltration?
I would have no clue. I’ve not watched any sports in nearly a decade. But given how this crap is in everything else entertainment related, no doubt the spectacle you describe is typical today.
And the most obnoxious female-related trend in sportsball is sticking them into the announcer’s booth. Like nails on a chalkboard.
They simply do not belong. But hey, inclusivity, dammit.
And chick sportscasters on the 6:00 news.
The rainbow uniforms is already a thing (I think they use rainbow colors for the numbers during June).
There is a relatively new tradition of football teams wearing pink as a means of pledging fealty to the Susan G. Komen Foundation. I suppose it’s just a matter of team until the players are required to wear the sort of fake tah-tahs worn by Secretary Buttplug when he’s nursing his poor, godforsaken child.
Being in procession of authentic tah-tahs, I hate the pink ribbon thing. I believe the Komen foundation was started by the usual suspects, meant to capitalize in every way possible the death of a sister.
I’m also guessing that breast cancer mostly runs only certain ethnic groups, which is why all of female America is supposed to run get their tah-tahs Xrayed??? at 40 to screen for cancer. But it’s free! (kind of)
No word on if the fake tah-tahs are supposed to get X-rayed regularly.
Only with my super-duper Xray vision!! Now step over here to disrobe…;-)
They’ve been doing this for the past decade, if not longer. Its actually one of the things that has turned me off to NFL
Do they still do it for an entire mumpf, or just a single Sunday?
I don’t know. I remember seeing pink on all of the uniforms in every game I saw about 10 years ago. I have no idea today as I ended my cable service in 2016.
That’s about when I tuned off the NFL, too.
Professional Wrestling both requires more athleticism and is less fixed than an NBA game.
Well, the Navy team is full of girls and trannies. It always has been.
Rim shot…!
you’ll be here all weekend.
Try the veal.
This has recently replaced Anchors Aweigh as Navy’s fight song: Where can you find pleasure, search the world for treasure Learn science technology? Where can you begin to make your dreams all come true On the land or on the sea? Where can you learn to fly, play in sports and skin dive Study oceanography? Sign off for the big band or sit in the grandstand When your team and others meet In the navy Yes, you can sail the seven seas In the navy Yes, you can put your mind at ease In the navy Come on people, fall… Read more »
That came out when I was a young petty officer second class and naive as can be about that type. Why the hell does my supervisor come up behind me and want to rub my shoulders all the time? No idea, he’s just weird that way. A lot of it makes sense now, but I never thought about homosexuals ever back then. Later in life as a traditionalist Episcopal priest in a very liberal diocese I was a target for some of the extremely progressive older “straight “ clergy and gay activist laity. One of the high ranking gays in… Read more »
You should have filed sexual harrassment complaints! No such animal back then, of course, and even if they did exist, you probably would have been punished for your homophobic complaints againt heauxmeaux.
I could go on and on about the before times when bowl games did not have corporate sponsors and it was a fun water cooler chat about what team was ‘the best’. Those days are long gone. I think, and maybe I mentioned it before, the Republic reminds me of when you watch a hunting show on the outdoor channel when they shoot a big buck and the deer runs around/away. It’s dead, but the buck does not know this. It’s the Republic, running about although it’s dead.
Yes, we’re in the spasmodic gesticulation stage, but rigor mortis will soon set in.
I find it somehow horrifying to see the deer flop over on its side with its legs galloping as though to escape its torment for a few seconds after being shot. That’s what I would too, if I could.
Read the Iliad. Legs a-drumming is a Thing. Not just for pigs and deer.
What drives me up the wall about football and sports, college or professional, are what those in my house call “The ‘We’ People”. You ask a friend how the game of their favorite team went over the weekend and they respond: “Yeah, we lost, we’re having a rough season; our new coach doesn’t know what he’s doing and our starter is out with an injury.” Wait a minute, who is ‘we’? Were you there, on the team, on the field? The team in question played in Colorado on Saturday, and I know for a fact you were sat on your… Read more »
I think the “We People” phenomenon is down to TV. Before TV kids would support the local team. Now you have kids from New York being Miami fans, and vice versa, because they saw a game on TV as a kid and took a shine to them then.
If anything, spectator sport should be about local community.
Forgot to mention, the “We People” friend obsessed with Chicago sports, is also a (somehow) even more fanatical University of Michigan football fan. No one in his family has ever attended a class there, never lived on that half of the state… no connection to it except he and the university are both in Michigan. He’s been one of my best friends for 25 years and I still do not understand this side to him.
Grew up as a Chicago sports fan (long ago). Given the content of all the pro (semi-pro in the case of White Sox) Chicago sports teams, why someone would actually want to be part of the ‘We’ crowd is difficult to understand.
Solothurn: Amen, amen, amen.
??? The anti-tank gun?
The same!
YES! Agree 100%. The synthetic, artificial “team” shit is pathetic. “We’re gonna make the playoffs! We’re goin’ ALL DA WAY, baby!”
Who the fuck is “we”? You’re an obese 300 lb 50-year old white slob sitting in front of a television wearing the jersey of some 22-year-old illiterate Negro sports mercenary making $20 million a year and you think you’re actually part of something other than a scam to lighten your wallet?
Get a fucking life… God, how disgusting.
So, Xman, tell us how you really feel about the white sports fan. No holding back now! No holding back…
I used to watch sports 30 years ago, I don’t have any problem with it as harmless entertainment…but in my ‘burg the white retards are utterly OBSESSED with it as if it were the end-all and be-all of the fucking universe. And the politicians know it and can lead them down the garden path like the Pied Piper. Take your money and give it to Israel, enact gun control, raise taxes, enact ridiculous regulations and draconian laws, line their own pockets with corrupt scams and graft — the retards will happily go along with ALL of it so long as… Read more »
I think I’m beginning to get the photo.
I see high school kids signing “letters of intent” every spring at the local high school to play college this or that and I’m pretty sure this year there was a sophomore who signed to play baseball with a state school 2.5 years down the line. These kids have their own profiles on multiple web sites, travel teams, go after school to “academies” run by former sportos who cracked the Cape Cod League once…it’s truly sad to see the priorities and know there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Once it’s in the parents — and it has been,… Read more »
American parents will invest tens of thousands a year in their mediocre kid’s sporting “career” (I’ve seen it repeatedly) rather than push for them to study for medical school or a physics scholarship.
It looks good on a resume!
It’s an artificial community for parents to be sure their kids hang out with respectable kids while the parents build rapport and get to travel and party like they were younger. Kids can’t get in trouble with the school stoners if they are travelling every weekend.
That’s a very charitable interpretation of the phenomenon. My guess is most parents are stoners themselves.
Absolutely true. We spent thousands to keep our kids in swimming year-round, Kept them busy, disciplined physically and academically and around a “good group of kids.” Got them onto high school teams and even water polo.
Removed
I can’t understand why this post hasn’t received any upvotes…
Water sports are the best! And the physical specimens they become! Occasional ear infections but my hockey son did the occasional broken bones routine. Still, all told, both my lads went into the trades and are doing great, and once Hockey Son switched to surfing both to this day are huge into physical fitness even after their long work days. Cannot recommend swim, surfing and water polo enough for your kids or grandkids!
Truth. I encouraged my boys, and sacrificed much sleep and fuel to keep them participating in team sports. I give two shits about sportsball but approved of the challenge, physical fitness, and better class of friends H.S. sports provided. The friends they hung around with worth it alone (Hockey and Water Polo for the win; extremely lilly cadre so no gangster garbage friends!)
I don’t recall any partying like when I was young with the other parents.. too tired driving between long work shifts, assistant coaching… dear Lord we have three weeks of away games… etc.
If your kid is a white boy, it’s a better bet to push for sport than for academics if you want to get into an elite school.
This may be true but the academic side will probably suffer and the youngster will likely opt for some “cinch major” at the elite college. Probably better to do some decent STEM degree at a state university.
Our nephew is low thirties and successful. He was stud center lineman on Princeton’s football team. Bid and inducted Cannon-Dial-Elm eating club, the culmination of the top now.
He’s about to become father his first child with a beautiful, smart and jocular lady from Maine. They are fellow dissidents. They recently moved to a restored home in Maine. I bought them Japanese toilets/bidets for housewarming.
You have a point. Academics are from a practical viewpount devalued considerably. You need business acumen or something unique in order to get by as a young white male today.
Do the toilets have the mini-basin on top that allows one to rinse his hands using the water that’s filling the tank? When I first went to Japan in 1995, I couldn’t believe that such a simple concept for water conservation hadn’t been adopted by the West. And 30 years later it’s even more surprising that it still hasn’t caught on, even in other East Asian countries.
There is something particularly creepy about the college recruiting game, especially things like online message boards of middle-aged men salivating over shirtless photos of the latest 17 and 18 year-old recruits.
Nope, no issues there, none at all!
I work for one of those websites and can confirm what you say. Those pathetic bozos write my paycheck, but I hold them in profound contempt all the same.
Once again, rank greed rears its ugly head. Little Braeden is no longer a son, he’s a cash cow. Sickening.
My stepsons’ son, [my Wife’s grandson] is starting his junior year in high school. He is an elite athlete, with all the investment you speak of from his father. I am told colleges will start making him offers on September 1 this year. He’s a JUNIOR for cristsake! He has two more years of high school. What are these vultures doing around this kid? If I was his dad, I would tell them “Piss-off, we’ll keep his options open until his senior year”. But I guess this is how business is done nowadays. It’s for the benefit of the college… Read more »
Young basketball phenoms are now collecting schollie offers as early as the eighth grade. No foolin’.
In my hometown’s league, a collection of small po-dunk farming communities, you’re starting to see the same thing. Schools with graduating classes of 70 people or so are recruiting local talent and finding creative ways for them to go to their school. This has created powerful dynasties that win state championships time and time again, largely through the talent of people who don’t even have roots in the community. There’s more than greed going on, and a lot of obsession with being “the winner”, no matter how hollow that victory is. The stars of the team will pack up and… Read more »
One of the most egregious pro examples I have seen of late is Rea Madrid. Their nickname is “Los Blancos” because of the white home uniform. Watched a recent game of theirs and of 11 players on the field only three were White. Should be called “Los Negros.”
You nailed it. The twin corrosives of sports in AINO are rank greed and the win-at-all-cost mindset.
“There’s more than greed going on, and a lot of obsession with being “the winner”, no matter how hollow that victory is. The stars of the team will pack up and leave town without a second thought the minute they get a better offer, but a least the school gets a trophy. Then everyone wonders why none of their kids want to settle back in town.” Worth repeating. Yes, greed is part of why the French soccer team is filled with French speaking Africans. The other part is want to “win” regardless of what that win means exactly. It’s the… Read more »
Maybe they’ll appear together on a box of Wheaties, French kissing, and reap a lucrative endorsement deal into the bargain.
“Wheaties?”
I can actually remember when Bruce Jenner was on the Wheaties box… back when he was a man and considered a symbol of masculinity and athleticism.
WTF happened to my country???
He’s still a man, of course, but a profoundly mentally ill man.
The post about baseball was about the trivialization and socialization of technology. This one is about the transition of industrial capitalism to financialism. Technology was supposed to be about developing new materials to make light-weight super-strong cars and airplanes, for example. Instead, it is used for computer-based management of a baseball game. I was expecting an aircar and I got 140 character text instead. Likewise, free market capitalism was supposed to be about bringing new technologies, new products, and new services to the marketplace (automated kitchens, for example?). Instead, we got the leveraged buyout of the whole frigging economy by… Read more »
Instead of getting useful technological developments by training actual scientists and engineers, this country decided to waste an incredible amount of human capital training financial engineers to degrade everything and enrich the parasitical overlords. I too, am quite sick of this shit.
“free market capitalism was supposed to be about bringing new technologies” Insofar as the “free market” exists at all, the only thing it will reliably produce is great wealth for whomever is best at manipulating markets and production. It’s a lot like evolution. It’s tautological. Survival of the fittest makes for more of those are, well, “fit”. What is fitness? It’s whatever survives at any given moment. People like to think that the free market is about this or that, but it’s only about what the market and government environment allow it to be about. A corrupt government and greed… Read more »
UCLA’s current undergrad demographics: Asian: 29%, White: 26%, Hispanic: 22%, Non-resident foreign: 9%, Black: 5%. It’s hard to get enthused about Bruins football when the team you grew up chearing was Mumbai City Football Club.
If you need a good example of how college football was corrupted, take Alabama as an example. You can compare Bear Bryant with Nick Saban and clearly see the evolution from tribalism to financialization from the death of the former to the retirement of the latter.
I’m sure there are other examples during this period. Not picking on Alabama.
What’s most obnoxious is Saban lamenting the modern mercenary nature of College Football, like he wasn’t one of the primary agents who made it happen. Give me a break.
Apparently NIL was the bridge too far, even for Saban. Recruiting is now, or soon will be, just a green paper chase. Add into that the corrosive effect of gambling, which destroys everything it touches, and it becomes too much to manage for any old school coach. It’s moneyball all the way down.
I Am slightly interested to see how the 12 team playoff works, however.
Saban doesn’t like NIL because it removes almost all the advantages he had running a semi-pro team at Alabama while the NCAA looked the other way and imposed their rules on every other college team
Brcause of this, every record Saban, “achieved,” in his Alabama run should have an asterisk next to it, just like the records for obvious PED user Serena Williams.
Over 20 years ago I had a friend who came from a big highschool in the Midwest that was popular for its football team. He said he used steroids with 4 players at age 15. They all eventually played in the nfl and some people recognize their names today when I tell the story.
I think NIL is why Jay Wright retired from coaching college hoops, too. Some of those guys still have a gag reflex. The vast majority of AINOians, however, do not.
I think even worse than NIL (to some extent you can hand that off to a collective) is the transfer portal. The top coaches spent years building a pipeline of elite talent and these days, that guy goes in with his scumbag dad and says if he doesn’t play day one he’s entering the portal. There are guys whose college career consisted of stops at 3 different schools, maybe even 4. I just don’t see how you can build a program like that.
Yes, it’s terrible. A mid-major program trying to build that one special team to make a memorable run in the Big Dance gets players they developed pillaged right when they’re on the verge of stardom. There is no loyalty and gratitude whatsoever. Only selfishness and greed.
Bags of money sold out from back doors of churches (Clemson) is a southern tradition. Saban was good, but not that good. Nobody has a run like he did without some outside help. See: Pete Carrol at USC. With all of that Southern California talent, they haven’t had the same kind of run since.
Fun fact: Pete Carroll, Saban and Bill Belichick are all part Croatian. Croatians like to genocide Serbs. Perhaps there also adept at cheating in football.
Leave inter-Balkan rivalries in the Balkans. Don’t bring your immigrant parents’ inter-ethnic squabbles here. I’ve met and liked many Serbs and many Croats. They’re all White Europeans of Christian heritage.
It was a joke.
My wife is Croatian. Her family is first-class Catholic people who are salt of the Earth. Don’t bag on all Croatians.
You gotta hand it to TN. He has a tremendous talent for always saying the wrong thing.
I’ve always had a way with words. Thank you. 😂
In fact, the founder of the Ustache, the Croatian Nazi paramilitary responsible for genociding Serbs, was a Catholic priest. (This is true, but it takes some effort to look it up.) I forgot the guy’s name.
Regardless of all that, it was just a joke, like people make jokes about Germans and they’re propensity to send people to the ovens.
Good jokes are funny and light spirited. Bringing up what looks to Americans be an approximately a billion year old grudge match from people with far more in common with each other than the world is neither.
Well put, not to mention how parochial and solipsistic it is.
Alabama? No, the greatest example was Penn State and Jerry Sandusky. The man was literally raping children on campus, and the university, including the sainted Joe Paterno, tried to cover it up to protect the precious football program. When it finally broke, Normie, of course, cared more about the sportsball and Paterno’s reputation than anything else.
Yeah, but that was like 2010 – ancient history by today’s standards.
Indeed, today Sandusky would just pretend to be a woman and he’d get a trophy for molesting instead.
I’ll always believe there was a lot more to that story. You don’t bring in Louis Freeh to investigate, you bring in Louis Freeh to cover up.
JZ-
There is more to that story.
A local DA that was investigating Sandusky disappeared around 2005 or so.
They found his laptop in a local creek, sans hard drives.
I sometimes look at estate sales online, and occasionally go to one. Aside from ugly mahogany furniture and decorative junk, the most common spiritual symbol is the Bear Bryant memorabilia. Sometimes Saban, but not often. I often think that if our Alabama civilization, as exemplified in estate detritus, is studied by archeologists or space visitors of the future, they will definitely conclude that the Bear was our god. These are Boomers, of course. I don’t criticize – I’m a Boomer too, and was a childhood Bama fan. I had a huge Johnny Musso poster on my bedroom wall. I didn’t… Read more »
The Pink Pony still in operation in Gulf Shores?
I think so. I may be too old for the Pink Pony.
Major Ogilvie for the win!
I had forgotten about him! This is a good trip down Memory Lane.
I was a young lad in AL during Bryant’s final years, and based on the impression I had then, those archaeologists wouldn’t be wrong.
You briefly touched on it here, but to me, the aspect of modern college football that made me tune out was dispelling the “student athlete” mythology. When you watch your favorite team or Alma-mater, those kids have an experience nothing like what you experienced. There’s no shared bond. Back when cnn occasionally did some investigative journalism, they had a great piece (you can still find it, circa 2014 I believe) on how dismal the reading comprehension was for the athletes of the large D1 basketball and football teams were. Close to 10% of the athletes were fully illiterate. An enormous… Read more »
Hey, Jimmy, nice to see ya’. (-;
It wasn’t so long ago that academic ineligibility was a specter that haunted college sports. Coaches, players and fans all dreaded grade reports because there was always a pretty good chance the hot-shot point guard or the lock-down cornerback flunked out and wouldn’t be able to play. Academic ineligibility is a thing of the past. Haven’t seen an instant of it in probably 20 years or more.
As I understand, the ‘athletes’ not only take the easiest joke classes, but usually they are issued ‘tutors’ by the athletic department that essentially do all the assignments for them.
Fake major fields are set up for them, too. The sad thing is, profs are allowing themselves to be suborned into this fraud. I guess an extra 20K per annum is an effective conscience blotter.
I worked at a community college that actually recruited football players! I was shocked. The white quarterback, from out of state, was actually a decent student. The black athletes, however — both football and basketball — usually failed to show up for class, were unprepared and completely disengaged if they did, and failed most or all of their exams. When the season ended they would simply vanish and and withdraw from the class, or quit college entirely. I think a fair number of them never expected or planned to get a degree, they were there to play ball for as… Read more »
Back when I was a TA, one of my “students” was a certain KD, hot-shot freshman on the college basketball team. He started the semester okay, but pretty soon stopped attending altogether and his grades naturally suffered. Along about this time I started getting visits from Athletic Department “advisers” wondering what could be done to help get KD’s grades up. I told ’em he could start attending class, doing the work, and earning the grades. This seemed to leave them disgruntled. Anyway, I was slightly concerned pressure would be applied to me to artificially elevate his grade. I told the… Read more »
Looks like he was sentenced to prison in 2023 for fraudulent healthcare reimbursement schemes, so you’re not far off. Did not investigate much further beyond a single article but looks like that basketball program really made a difference in the life of another young scholar!
Considering the small numbers, there’s actually been a lot of ex-athletes pinched for healthcare reimbursement fraud. And considering the sorts we are talking about, you know they didn’t hatch that themselves…
I cannot hear of college football without thinking of photo ModernHeretic3000 posted of the LSU squad taking the field, a score of coal black faces, captioned “Diversity”.
I think the continued grip college football has on white men is even more offensive than that of rhe NFL.
College Football: Affirmative Action at its finest.
We call our college team the Razorblacks.
That wins the internet today.
It’s a professional sport now insofar as top players are paid. The starting athletes have nothing in common with the actual students. I haven’t watched television for thirty years with exception of alma mater’s Wolverines, football, hockey and wrestling only. I had stopped watching but resumed last year because football was on a successful quest to win a national championship. I started on an intercollegiate team that was ranked #2 nationally and seldom had opportunity to attend the other sports back then, so I was making up for the past, I suppose. It’s such a time sink even when working… Read more »
I will still watch college football and hockey, but it is in the background while I do other things. There’s just too much nonsense woven into a football game now for me to see and watch it. Hockey is not too bad, but college football is a three hour commercial/sermon with some game play thrown in.
It still boggles my mind how people can stand the commercials and constant interruptions, and don’t get me started on the commentary. There’s no reason a football game should last more than 2 and a quarter hours and zero reason for anyone to give a play-by-play of what you can see right in front of you.
I believe that is slowly killing the popularity of the game. But it takes a while, because allegiance to their team (moreso in some regions of the country than others) has a religious importance to the fans, so they endure the commercials and whatnot. However, it makes the game less attractive to new fans, who have many more other entertainment options now.
Yeah – men who boycotted the NFL when Kapernick took the knee went right back to it when the owners/corporations panicked and whipped their slaves back into line. “Time for my draft!” This kind of nonsense is wrecking us.
That was the beginning of WOKE.
See: Major League Baseball
“It still boggles my mind how people can stand the commercials”
Like when the only ads you would see before a movie were for other movies? Gambling was legalized in many states after 08, many states also moved into the illicit drug trade. They’re desperate for money. They refuse to allow deflation to happen because if would cause a revolution. Even if you didn’t have a revolution due to deflation, those in charge would still lose power because they have the most to lose from it.
For any significant release in a theater there is a solid 30 minutes of garbage in front of it.
I include the trailers in that because the ideas and presentation are so tired and infantile.
How about ads while you’re pumping gas, gotta love that 😉
The MAVERIK gas station by my office brazenly states “Tired of hearing ads like this? Sign up for our rewards card!”
It’s like how TSA harasses people into buying TSA Precheck. “Don’t want be treated like a terrorist in your own country? Pay us this extortion fee.”
Gotta hand it to the rotten sumbitches–they cover every dam’ angle.
On the up side, you can buy your exact seat now, and show up at the start of the movie with having to stand in line. I use the commercials to go back out and get some popcorn.
We don’t watch commercial TV any more, but on rare occasions we’ll turn it in. This happened a few weeks ago with the Olympics. My wife turned on NBC prime time coverage at 6pm local. 20 minutes into the broadcast we had seen THREE “human interest” stories and dozens of commercials…and absolutely zero sports.
She turned off the TV and we didn’t bother with the Olympics again.
I remember the old saying “I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.”
Hockey is still good, even the farm leagues. NHL isn’t much to write home about…
The top contending schools might play a total of 4-5 competitive games all season. It’s rare that I even put a game on, but when I do, it’s background noise because it’ll probably be a 44-3 final score. I realized a few years back that I was mainly listening out of feelings of nostalgia. College football sounds a certain way that my brain immediately associates with Fall and cooler weather. I think for a lot of people, that is all it is: nostalgia. They put on their hoodie and down a few beers and pretend they’re 22 and back in… Read more »
What with incessant rap blasting at ear-shattering level, and the marching band relegated to halftime shows, college football sounds nothing like it used to. Leastwise, not at most unis.
NHL games constantly feature jungle music during stoppages. It’s appalling.
I’ve noticed they play a lot of white people rock. Because most of the people in the stands are white people. I’m not saying they don’t blast other kinds of music/noise, but they know who pays the bills.
About the only rock I hear is AC/DC. And even that gets old very quickly.
“Especially in view how much the experience has been politicized.”
This has killed my desire to go to the movie theater. It’s almost like hollywood decided to punish the populace after 2016 for voting for the wrong person. But even the stuff that isn’t “political” is usually a rehash of something you’ve already seen 900 times. Much cheaper to repackage the same stuff over and over then take a risk on something new. Like i said yesterday about the zmans failing bank analogy, every year things get a wee bit worse.
“It’s almost like hollywood decided to punish the populace after 2016 for voting for the wrong person.” You nailed it – that’s the truth right there. I’m in the biz; I hear the rants all the time. These people are unhinged. + the explosion of people with MBA’s in the business is what has caused – IMHO – the total & complete degradation of the product into the repackaging/endless franchise/reboots. No one wants to take a risk & filmmaking is inherently risky; there’s no “sure fire formula” to guarantee a hit so they try to repackage films & market them… Read more »
All the more reason for deflation. When the only way to make money is by selling the cheapest product you can put out, your costs are wayyyyy to high. Though i think the film industry has a money laundering problem also
And its not just Hollywood, its every industry. That is why they all keep merging, the market can’t support even a few super large corporations, so one eats the other until only one remains. Not like the government will ever enforce anti trust laws except asking for a cut by charging fines. Deflation is the answer to all our problems. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will… Read more »
Marvel isn’t coming back.
The Infinity Gauntlet saga is their most epic story arc. I knew that reading the comics as a little kid. They literally have nowhere left to go.
Bringing back RDJ is a mistake because it craps on the entire Iron Man arc. I’m also surprised he came back for Dr. Doom, a character that is always in a mask.
Also, no one cares about the Fantastic Four. Heck, no one cared about them in the 80s and the 90s because the world had already passed them by.
Marvel isn’t coming back? I didn’t know it left. Good riddance.
The corruption of the various institutions of our society will allow for our rebirth. You can see it everywhere as institution after institution loses its moral authority. No one trusts the govt or the media. Now, the top educational institutions are losing their shine as people witness the insanity coming from “top” universities. College football is simply another institution losing its sway over people. The first step is people rejecting the authority of the institution. We’re in that process now. The next step is creating new institutions that match the values (and, likely, the demographics) of your people. That’s what… Read more »
Shine and sway losses are reflected in alienation of the older alumni, too. Read current alumni magazines and compare those to prior years. The Woke aspect is only one of the problems. The editors, or their puppet masters, go out of their way to tell older alumni to never donate again. Combine that with the depersonalization, idiotic league changes and rampant cheating for admission and grades on so-called university level coursework. There you have indicators of the decline of tertiary education. Smarter kids avoided the nonsense and debt to learn productive, portable skills rather than exiting with $250,000+ for a… Read more »
A lot I agree with there, Mr. F’d Up. I throw my alumni magazine straight into the trash to avoid the degradation and degeneracy display in its pages. The alumni associate is trying to get me to donate to the school to purchase some trinket for the campus. No sale. And apparently 43% of my class agree the place doesn’t deserve a penny from us, given how it has allowed gay marriages in the chapel, full bore diversity admissions, and a defacto anti-white male agenda. And, in appreciation for being a loyal alumnus, you get the honor of getting wanded… Read more »
I used to give a 50 bucks for some scholarship fund until the Uni I graduated from renamed my particular college because the guy it was named after – who donated the all land the uni is built on – owned some slaves back in the days it was legal. Now when they call I just say my college doesn’t exist anymore.
I had my undergrad and grad schools remove my name from alumni mailing lists. Haven’t gotten anything from either in almost 25 years. A letter from a classmate guilted me into sending a minimal donation in 2000, for the 20th reunion, but I haven’t been back to either school and don’t plan on it in my lifetime.
When our utopia rises from the ruins, I’d like it to be inhabited by people who don’t give two shits about college or pro sports.
Academia is one of the primary sources of rot and decay in the US. Supporting them in any way is supporting the enemy. Some compromises have to be made if your kid wants to enter a profession requiring a degree, but supporting college sportsball is entirely unnecessary. 80 years ago, college sports was far more about the athleticism of the students. Today, the teams are loaded up with dummies who are gifted useless degrees in order to have a winning team. Of course, they are all being paid, so it’s not really even amateur. It’s fake and gay like most… Read more »
80 years ago, college sports was far more about the athleticism of the students. Way back in 1932 The Marx Brothers were making fun of the obsession over college football in their movie Horse Feathers: “The film revolves around college football and a game between the fictional Darwin and Huxley Colleges. Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff, the new president of Huxley College, is convinced by his son Frank, a student at the school, to recruit professional football players to help Huxley’s losing football team. Baravelli is an “iceman”, who delivers ice and bootleg liquor from a local speakeasy. Pinky is also… Read more »
I wondered in 2020 while statues of Lee and Jackson were being removed and melted down whether southern culture is now wrapped up in SEC Football games and that’s about the extent of it now in most young southern males?
It’s college football, barbecue, and whatever awful music the “artistic” descendants of Garth Brooks are putting out. And big trucks. And megachurches.
New statue erected in Houston. https://www.deccanchronicle.com/world/americas/90-foot-hanuman-statue-unveiled-in-houston-third-largest-in-us-1817659
What’s the US coming to, and how did it get this far?
Mostly white gullibility for a clever enemy who is a gifted storyteller. This enemy reinterpretted the history of the whites to turn the white urges towards compassion and universalism against the whites themselves.
The end result is the media telling whites everday to hate themselves and everyone thinks this is normal.
A strain of the whites have always been utopian and they were happy to assist the enemy in subduing their own people.
As a wise and ornery (young) man once said: “The Boomer generation and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race”.
That is FUNNY. (Dark humor, to be sure, but that is what we have left.) The only time I have heard of Hanuman before was that he was the ape god from RE Howard’s Conan. It makes me care even less about articles like: As Conflict Escalates, Secret Russian Files Reportedly Reveal Lowered Nuclear Threshold Training.
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/as-conflict-escalates-secret-russian
The rodents that walk on two legs destroying the West deserve everything they have incoming.
Dear Lord.
so, I wonder if Nimrata Randhawa or Vivek Ramaswamy or Usha Chilukuri (Vance) will make a press trip to go see this amazing new work of art that graces the Texan landscape.
So it’s a stature celebrating street shitters?
In Texas?
The collapse can’t come soon enough.
I’m not sure if Houston is really Texas anymore
Jeffrey: Ostei likes to insist the western part of the state is still Texas. Well, take away at least 50-75 miles along the border. Take away El Paso, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, and all city environs. Take away places like Celina and Princeton. Texas is only Texas in people’s imagination, not reality.
DFW and El Paso are still Texas. Dallas is a shithole, but is still undeniably Texas, and Ft. Worth and EP are about as Texas as it gets. The presence of Messkins doesn’t undercut that. Like it or not, they’ve been a part of Texas as long as it’s existed. Real Texas exists. Your imaginary Texas never has.
Disagree. DFW is NY and Chicago and California and China and Mumbai. It is rare to meet anyone there who is Texas born and bred (and White). We spent the past 29 years there. Fort Worth is a bit more Texas, and also a lot more Mexican. And like it or not, most Mexicans are NOT those with roots in Texas going back 100 years – they are almost all 1st and 2nd generation by birth, and still 100% Mexican by genetics and culture. Husband grew up in El Paso when it was 70% White; it is now Juarez writ… Read more »
I’ve lived in Texas 50 years and lived in Princeton, New Jersey two years. Although Texas has changed–and demographics are a major part of that–it still feels much more like the Texas I remember from 1974 than it does New Jersey. It’s all a matter of perspective. Just because something changes, doesn’t mean it has vanished. The Texas spirit is alive and fairly well. You just have to know where to look.
A giant statue of an Asian deity, eh? Where’s the Taliban when you really need them?
The family who has always gone to Oklahoma continues to suspect that the people with the Longhorn sticker on their car are Harris voters
A well founded suspicion.
Thanks for a good chuckle!
I know some OU alums and they are good reliable Harris voters too.
All the same, Norman’s the helluva lot better town than Austin. And it’s a Texan saying that, by the by.
Could there be anything designed to induce more ferocious eye-rolling than the continued and ubiquitous use of the term, “student-athlete”? If any more proof were needed that the Power Structure is the Father of Lies, this is it.
You can be a jock or a nerd. Not both.
There have been and still are rare exceptions, of course, but 90+% of today’s stoodint-affletes haven’t cracked a book since “See Shitavio’us Run!” back in kindergarten.
It’s not just college football: look abroad and the same thing has happened with soccer. Money has absolutely ruined local (i.e. national) leagues. Don’t get me started… (OK, just a few points!) 1) Star cult: super damaging to the game. Players like Ronaldo and Messi have been past their sell-by date for years but are still fielded because they draw in TV viewers, sell stadium tickets, sponsored sports gear. See Copa America final recently: when Messi came off through injury, Argentina improved drastically and went on to win. The Star Cult also means that big players get LeBron-type calls rather… Read more »
You’d think some kind of western financial collapse could cure a lot of what’s wrong with the (exceedingly boring) sport that’s called soccer. Since hypothetically the money would no longer be concentrated in the UK. It’s kind of baffling that it still is, frankly.
I expected something of the kind to happen due to COVID. However, it bounced back even stronger than before. Maybe more people stuck at home in lockdown ended up watching?
It’s why a middling, throwback club like Millwall receives outsized attention. There remains a residual amount of whites who still crave the tribalism.
If you want to be really depressed, go read the message boards on websites devoted to the major English clubs. Thread after thread decrying this racist incident, that drunken punch up, or this “offensive” chant. It was barely one generation ago that these clubs’ supporters were testosterone-filled men. They’re all sissies now.
Millwall used to be kind of a BNP redoubt in the midst of a sea of diversity (South London). Their fans have always had a tough reputation. I don’t know if that’s still the case, been many, many years since I was in that area.
The crash of Western civilization tracks with the decline of white masculinity.
Every field has a version of this. There’s an old Aerosmith album that despite having no hits had an outsized influence on popular ’80s metal and the “grunge” that followed it. Music guys know the one. Recently I heard an academic musicological symposium about it, including two of the biggest names in our biz. The panel discussion was about how the lyrics are “gross” and how strange it is that trans ally Kurt Cobain—it’s been decided that that’s the way history will remember him—was such a big fan, because Aerosmith is so “gross.” The questions from the audience were requests… Read more »
Kinda low IQ to assume the posters on these boards represent the majority of fans.Self-selection is a thing. Also, I find it heartening that there are still problematic incidents.
I used to be appalled when I saw videos of soccer hooliganism. I gather there just isn’t the enthusiasm for it these days. I rather miss it.
They reserve all their enthusiasm for condeming the raycism of fellow whites in the most ostentatious way possible, while ignoring all the murders and rapes of their daughters and sisters by the sainted wogs.
Sorry to be a curmudgeon, but I’ve always loathed college athletics simply because I can’t nod and wink along to someone lying to my face. I’m sure it’s been the case since I’ve been old enough to watch it that colleges are recruiting half-wits to attend school that can barely write their own names and paying them under the table in violation of the rules. Then they lie to our face about what they’re doing and pretend that everyone on the field is a “scholar” and they’re all “amateurs” playing for the love of the game. The lying extends even… Read more »
I never got it either, and I also never got the guys who gave up on all that and became obsessive with high school sports. Maybe it’s just not my thing, but I’m well aware of the fact that all that cable TV airtime has to get filled with something.
NFL Films were great, but nothing happens in football games. Televising that raw material was a primitive “reality TV”: self-scripting (almost), low-production-cost filler that’s visually boring enough to make the commercials seem thrilling in comparison. I haven’t seen a game this century, but the trend was toward making the parts between commercials too noisy and referential (to celebrity, politics, products, and other shows) to work as proper filler. If men are turning the Sunday show off, that’s why. It’s nagging. In a similar irony to Foucault generating the rhetoric of “wokeness,” McLuhan et al. influenced media experts—who unsurprisingly end up… Read more »
University of South Carolina?
No, actually! I can’t say I’m surprised it’s a regular occurence though.
Looks like I might go for a few drinks in Dublin this weekend, American tourists are usually good fun. I will avoid all talk of politics if possible
You might do alright with Georgia Tech and Florida State fans who have enough money to travel to Ireland. The schools turn this into a big vacation package for fans and donors. They spend a week hitting the usual tourist spots before the game.
They will all be packed into Temple Bar Friday and Saturday. They hold one of these games every year in Dublin so it is well planned. It is a great time, even if you are not interested in the game.
I understand they’re going to rename it New York Giants’ Causeway…
If they’re students from those schools, you should ask them if they agree with student debt forgiveness, and if they say yes ask them how the hell they paid for being in attendance and what right they have to foist those costs on taxpayers. Freaking CHUDS
I’ve questioned people online about what they spend student loan money on and they go absolutely ballistic when you suggest that travel and elaborate stereos are not the best use of the loan money.
https://www.lendingtree.com/student/spring-break-student-loans-survey/
No debt forgiveness, let it go back to bankruptcy. President potato head is the one who made it illegal to discharge student debt in the early 2000’s. Almost like they knew it was a problem even back then and didn’t want to stop the gravy train. Private lenders got out of the market in 08 and its been .gov financed ever since. Democrats protecting one of their party rackets. Same with healthcare
Make Bankruptcy Great Again!
The Globalist mindset abhors localism and particular places, which is reflected with the addition of Oregon, Washington, USC and UCLA joing the Midwest Big Ten, along with Eastern schools Rutgers, Maryland and Penn State. Last year I looked at the rosters of the football teams of Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin just out of curiosity to see where the players are from. Their players come from everywhere, such as Florida, New Jersey, California, etc. It used to be that those teams would consist of mostly in-state players, supplemented with many from neighboring states and a just a few from far away.… Read more »
As Seinfeld stated in the late 90s, modern sports is basically about rooting for laundry.
Yes, triple parentheses and all that.
True. Although the propaganda wings of franchises and athletic departments do their damnedest to convince the rubes that Saint Shitavious is a blood-and-soil worshiper of the local burg. Then somebody comes along with a bigger bag of gold and he’s driving his new Escalade to the rival burg down the road.
The fake localism of sportsball has always turned me off. There is not a single team in all of sportsball made up of only locals. If “my town’s” team is made up of whoever they could buy from anywhere in the country (or the world in some cases) and is owned by someone not even from the area, it’s not my town’s local team. It’s just a globohomo clownshow.
High school sportsball is far more authentic. Even that is changing.
Looking at history it seems that sporting spectacles of some kind are an integral part of civilization; it’s just a question of which sport is popular at which time and place. When college football is no longer the circus, something else will be. From an evolutional perspective, what I find more disturbing is the negrofication of it, and how that has infected the white fans. Especially the younger more impressionable ones.
I think it’s a matter of proportion, as with everything, and moderation.
American football is catching on here in Germany in a big way. Fun fact, no German team is allowed to have more than two American players. Evidently Germany still has a long way to go to play up to US standards. I think partly because sports is not part of school here, it’s always an after school thing with mostly private clubs. No such thing as school or university rivalry or the level of competitiveness your kids have growing up.
I was at a game in Frankfurt last year. I was surprised by the local interest. I sat next to an old guy and he had a great knowledge of the game. The giant beers at the game were a nice touch.
Germans are an odd bunch. When I was stationed there I dated a German girl who was part of a square-dancing club. No hayseed American has never been better and more intensely focused on square dancing than anyone of those club members.
Germans and Japanese never take to hobbies by halves. It’s Full-on 1000% or nothing.
I wonder how many of those square dancers were also Karl May readers… The Old West sprouted shoots in weird places.
Germany and Japan are satrapies of the GAE, so they need to be enculturated with the imperial ethos, at least until the Morgenthau’ing is complete.
Same story with that gas pipeline mysteriously going kaput.
They’re trying to push Gridiron in Australia, but thankfully we have our own sportball (and thankfully, it is more skilled and eventful than Jogger Felon League).
Ditto with Swing dancing.
Doing a check of ticket prices for some top 25 teams shows you can get ones to games against cream puff opponents Labor Day weekend for dirt cheap, but the Clemson-Georgia game in Atlanta is still over $100 for the worst seats. Colleges have still managed to have some success pulling people in for the environment around the game. Tailgating is still a big deal and like the NFL they have had success getting businesses to buy tickets. Going to a game is usually a fun time, especially if the weather is nice, but hardcore fandom seems to be dropping… Read more »
I wonder how long gambling props up sports. In the days when Jimmy “The Knife” was setting odds and you could find an edge by studying the sports pages, gambling made some sense. Now it is robots setting the lines to maximize the take. Even if you use your own robots, the opportunities are increasingly small.
There have been some recent articles about what a problem online sports betting has become already. College football fans have always been dumber than most about how they bet. Brain dead allegiance to the alma mater without any thought as to how likely they are to cover the spread. I saw a post this week that said one of the books reported taking a $10k bet on Colorado to win the Big XII, they will be lucky to finish in the top half of the league and have no chance of winning it. There is zero political will to even… Read more »
I am of two minds on the sports betting issue. Making it easy for people to place bets from their mobile device is going to create more social pathology and inevitably result in the rigging of games. This is a huge problem with European soccer. On the other hand, the proliferation of casinos has been bad for casinos. Once the novelty wears off, they were left with the degenerates who would find a way to piss away their money on something. Sports betting has another issue and that is technology. My guess is the old fashioned schemes like point spreads… Read more »
So there’s a new market for convoluted financial instruments, the product is morally injurious, every transaction is integrally rigged against the customer, and “demand” has been generated by successful lobbying for changes in the law, not by traditional economic means.
Sounds like exactly the kind of thing that just happens and nobody did it.
College football is as tattered and lifeless a tradition as flying the American flag these days…
Something else I dislike is the renaming of sports facilities from their traditional names to those of corporate sponsors. I first noticed this driving up the 101 from SFO into the city when I saw that Candlestick Park had been renamed 3Com Stadium about 20 years ago.
In my area, the Rose Quarter has been renamed ModaCenter. I despise this trend.
In a free market society, everything is a commodity. Everything.
The money obsession is as easily as tiring the virtue signaling over race. The Overton window is so tiny that no one is allowed questions about either.
I used to be a huge college football fan. In the Southeast, you watch SEC football on Saturday and go to church on Sunday. But now, I just don’t give a damn. In the past decade, the someone logical regional conferences have been replaced by gerrymandered hoovering machines designed to maximize TV money. Players are now paid in shady deals by boosters that are now LEGAL and the playoffs have expanded to 12 teams like the NFL. Cripes, they’re even going to have a two-minute warning like the NFL. When the U.S. Supreme Court decided that 1982 case against the… Read more »
The chicks’ teams will always be protected like the crown jewels because of Title 9. However, I can easily see men’s sports not named football or basketball getting scrubbed.
College teams were always the NFL’s (and NBA’s) minor leagues. They’re just being more honest now.
While it’s true that people hold onto traditions I think that really only applies if they both grew up with it & had a positive experience. If you grow up & all you’ve seen is people clinging to a husk you’re probably not going to cling to it. I’m reminded of a fishing spot that my family had gone to generations, when it was my time it was already in the beginning stages of diversity decay. Every year I went it was worse off & eventually I stopped going. Admittedly I have a very low tolerance for diversity & especially… Read more »
I’m not versed in the finer points of handegg, but where does the füssbøll-influence come in? To me it just looks like rugby in body armor, except in rugby you’re actually allowed to kick the egg sometimes.
I never played. But it always seemed too technical for me. The different positions were so specialized there was something artificial about it. I played lacrosse. Hitting someone with a stick, lowering your shoulder at someone unawares tryi g to pick up a ground ball and flattening him? Now that’s a sport!
America is home to hundreds of millions of personally-owned firearms and a gazillion rounds of ammunition. Most of this sits in dusky vaults and is rarely used except for a few token trips to the shooting range or the annual hunting week in the woods. During the Olympics, a middle-aged white guy from Turkey took the silver in pistol shooting and become an international sensation. Since financialization has destroyed sports, why can’t the reverse also be true?
I have not watched any sports in nearly a decade. The last time I watched football was the year Seattle won the Superbowl (I think it was ’14). College ball is no longer what it was because the players will now actually get paid starting, I think, next year. You are correct that the Pac12 no longer exists. Most of the schools that were in it are now a part of the Big12, which is now probably the big24 or something like that. The transition of college ball actually started 25 years ago when they went to a true play-off… Read more »
“For most families, primary school is a function of where they live. Your kids go to the local public schools whether you like it or not. It is why in the current age it has become common to ask the realtor showing you houses about the local basketball team. Parents understand that they are not just buying a house, but they are committing their children to the schools that come with the community in which the house is located.” Questions about the quality of the school district are really questions about the extent of “diversity”, which is itself an euphemism… Read more »
Hence the queries about the local high school basketball team.
Wrestling and field hockey are good bets, I’d guess.
Or the FFA.
As has been said elsewhere, you want a school district where the schools are safe and the basketball teams are mediocre.
We used Niche to filter out where to live. Ignore the overall grade. We looked for the lower diversity grades. And they also will list the math and English test scores if you are willing to read the paragraph about the school.
Go to Schooldigger. Grades only tell you how many Asians have moved in, or subcons who check the “white” box on the census records. Check local elementary school racial demographics over the past decade. Compare to high school racial demographics. Then you know who has moved in and who is having kids, and you delete those places from where you are looking. It’s quite simple; don’t know why people make it so complicated or ask the realtor. Demographics > income > grades.
Diversity and merit are inversely proportional.
While they were published, free and reduced lunch rates were the absolute metric of school demographics. The less kids who needed food at lunch time, the whiter and better the school.
I am finally making some headway with “normies” on how they’ve been systematically robbed. I show them a quarter from 1963 which was 90% silver and has a value of $5 based on its silver content. Versus its $0.25 face value. The difference is 20 to 1 (as an aside, I believe the latest ratio in fractional banking was a bank could loan out 20 times the actual holdings in its vault). So I say that difference of $4.75 is what the government has essentially stolen from you. And why the price of eggs should really be about $0.20 if… Read more »
I’m glad you posted some more comments so I could down-vote them. Keep it up!
Went to grad school at USC. It was fun to watch tne big time football program. Now that it’s pro football with free agents and all, and the Pac-10 is dead – I’ve lost all interest.
its kinda cool here today. Feels like fall, but I know I’ll get tricked with another 90+ humid day between now and real fall. i think the collapse of everything I remember and love from growing up in the 80s had increased what would also be a nostalgic age anyway, but I have been especially nostalgic in the last few years. college football was a big part of fall. But it was going to the games in middle school and high school that was so fun. not the games. Sometimes. My family would watch a game on tv. It was… Read more »
Chatting with an old gentleman at the Heysham station in the UK, he asked me who my team was. He seemed fairly amazed and dismayed when I told him I didn’t have one, that we just had college teams that I didn’t follow.
And thus endeth that conversation…
College football in the South has always been an important social get together, often with major players taking part in a generally friendly rivalry..i.e. the Texas-Arkansas game attracting a lot of oil and gas executives…I know of at least one major contract (in 8 figures) being signed by friendly rivals…Texas won that game, but Arkansas got the better of the oil and gas deal….
Many years ago, when Moon Man was a threat so great to the power and rent-seeking opportunities enjoyed by The Jew Thing that they proscribed the entire genre, a bright young thoughtcriminal channelled his college experience into something called “Chimps in Suits” which speaks directly to the darker side of all this. It can still be found, if one knows where to look.
The mega conferences, the transfer portal, and NIL are going to ruin college football. Schools like USC and UCLA have no business being in the Big 10, and give it a year or two and they’re going to figure out it’s a poor fit for them. I don’t know how long the contract lasts, but there’s some kind of term, and probably a penalty for dropping out early. I think there will be an effort to put back together some kind of Pacific coast conference. It never made sense to me that Utah and Colorado were Pac 12 members, so… Read more »
College football was the only sport I actively followed. It has been ruined and is now NFL Lite. It will continue to be successful in the short run due loyalty of old fans, curiosity seekers and NFL fans looking to watch something on Saturday afternoons attracted to it becoming more like the NFL.
I watched a video the other day about a new NFL player refusing to sign up with the PA for licensing rights, and it goes back to what happened to him in college. Basically, after the whole NIL stuff came out, Fanatics.com, a giant sports merchandise company that is run by Michael Rubin, started going to college athletes and offering them a bit of upfront money in exchange for restrictive and burdensome deals that are now limiting the top guys’ ability to maximize revenue now that they made it to the pros. If that reminds you of the deals that… Read more »
Rubin, eh? Every. Single. Time.
I’ve mostly lost interest in pro and college football. I still follow the local high school teams (I still live in the district I and my children attended) The boys play for fun and they are mostly local (although charter and religious schools have become prominent). There are still local rivalries that are actually local (not Oregon and Rutgers). It is what sports should be but no longer is above the high school level.
https://youtu.be/k6b_DLbonb4?si=lETQTPB3_PfB2pnB
Despite what my admissions, I will never regret attending this in person at Hill, not ever: <iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/nvH8AhuAJnU?si=8_RDGtnVzuqGXX7U” title=”YouTube video player” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen></iframe>
I enjoyed your article and agree, generally with the premise.
However, you would agree that the group of schools in the south eastern part of the United States have been more successful in maintaining the traditions you spoke of rather than being a façade. And to my relief, it doesn’t appear like they’re going to be changing in the near future.
I think the Midwestern schools may be doing a better job than the Southern ones in sustaining traditions, but I could be wrong.
This article needs a little more development on a few points. 1. First of all, universities are not necessarily running big time sports and entertainment by choice. They do it because it is one of the best ways to promote your school. College administrators also say that a successful football program is the number one driver of enrollment and can lift a school’s academic profile. One example is the University of Southern California, which used football to raise its academic profile. (They were a bit of a backwater school back in the old days.) In fact, the blue bloods of… Read more »
i think you missed the point of his entire article……..
I got the point of the article, but it’s popular to bash college athletics when people don’t understand the bigger picture. Without athletics, a university campus is just a glorified office park. Athletics also keeps alums, some of whom are incredibly wealthy, connected to their school. When was the last time you cared about your high school and how it does in sports competition? Awareness of your university is a lifelong endeavor for many people.
did colleges always operate like that?
Yes. OSU stadium was built in 1922 and it had 60,000 seats to begin with.
Colleges didn’t exist before 1922?
The point is that people loving college football is not a new phenomenon.
And my point is that for people to love something, it doesn’t have to have money attached to it. I think what zman was saying is things start out just because people like it, then parasites realize you can make money from it, then the industry matures and becomes corrupt. The cycle starts again. What did you think he said?
(Also correct me if i’m putting words into your mouth zman)
Hell, they’ve even monetized dating, how long before they they start charging you for breaths of air? And this fits into what myself and Mr. Tarkas are discussing below. In a debt based system the debt must always grow (the spice must always flow!) So must continue to monitizie things to continue to grow the economy and create “jobs”.
We have far too many kids in colleges. The kids who don’t belong in college the most (on average, I know there are exceptions) are the “student athletes,” especially football.
These programs likely attract generic students. Someone thinking about being a geologist is going to pick the school with the best geology program. “I was going to pick school X, which has a great Y dept, but I chose Z school because it had a better team” said virtually nobody ever.
Again, DEFLATION is the answer. When you get to the root of deflation its rather frightening and you understand why they fear it so much. If the Economy was an Eco System (good way to think of it) Deflation is the environment telling you that you’re above carrying capacity.
But the root cause of deflation being such a problem is the way our economies are structured. It’s a self-caused problem. It has bee set up in such a way that it needs perpetual growth, even if the growth is just nominal. We very likely have not had real growth in decades.
Exactly, it(deflation: the bad form, good deflation does exist also but that isn’t relevant to our conversation) shows that they’re incompetent and structural changes need to happen. If you’re running the show, do you want to relinquish power? Is it any wonder they have everyone fighting about genders and nonsense? Or trying to start wars overseas? If the financial system explodes, who do you think will get the blame? They inject that into the conversation, point at the plebs and say why don’t yinz two guys fight?
What deflation is good in our economic system? Keep in mind that I am using the term deflation to mean the contraction of the supply of money and credit. But I really know very little about the subject, so there be deflation I am unaware of. If you mean falling prices, usually prices fall for different reasons and really don’t have much deflationary force. Like if something used to be made really well, but now is plastic junk, it likely has a lower price, but is not deflationary. Or if some new process makes an improvement and lowers price, this… Read more »
Good deflation would be when you become efficient at making a product and can then sell it for a lower price. People generally use the computer industry as an example. The cost was very high when the industry started but was lowered over time due to becoming more efficient in production. Then again that deflation could also because we shipped our manufacturing industry to SE asia. “Like if something used to be made really well, but now is plastic junk, it likely has a lower price, but is not deflationary.” I wouldn’t call that deflation. If something costs me 100… Read more »
From my understanding, deflation is damaging not because the general price levels fall, but because debt is destroyed. One man’s debt is another man’s asset. You default on your debt, the person holding that debt has to write off that asset. He’s now broke and so his debtors have to write off his debt and so on. They call this a “deflationary spiral” Lots of layoffs and business failures reduce demand even further and may lead to additional business failures, layoffs and closures. But if prices are falling because of increased productivity, poorer build quality or a fad going out… Read more »
And how do most companies make major structural changes? Bankruptcy 😉
This entire problem could be sorted out if we followed the rules of capitalism. All you have to do is stop bailing things out
“It has bee set up in such a way that it needs perpetual growth, even if the growth is just nominal.”
That only happens when your currancy is debt and debt is your currancy. The gold standard existed for a reason. You can only inflate so much if you have a hard anchor (and honest people who enforce the rules fairly).
AFAIK, we have never been on a “real” gold standard and there have been deflationary recessions in the 19th century.
At some point in the 1880s or 1890s there was a major boom bust cycle ending in a huge deflation.
From what I know, the Dollar was backed by both “commercial paper” and gold. Presumably this “commercial paper” was what fueled the boom.
Yes you still had deflationary depressions, but they generally didn’t last as long. They also let the deflation happen back then. Everything we’ve done since 08 and even 01 was to prevent deflation. Its why they drop rates to 1% (2001) and then in 08 to 0% plus QE. QE is just buying bad debts and putting them on the feds balance sheet and giving the holder of the debt cash. And a lot of what they’ve been buying have been treasuries, so what does that say about treasuries. Capitalism needs to destroy itself from time to time, if you… Read more »
Warren Buffett recently increased his holdings of US treasuries to about $200 billion worth. So that’s one person, who ought to know, who still has some faith (in treasuries). But not in stocks, to which his exposure is correspondingly reduced.